Product Jungle: IT's Private Cloud Struggles | 5 Contrarian Tips On Innovation

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Monday, May 13, 2013

Chris Murphy

5 Contrarian Tips On Innovation

Here's an oxymoron you never want applied to your company: It has a stale innovation strategy. Innovation is just as prone to insipid groupthink and cookie-cutter efforts as any other corporate initiative.

That risk is why I latched onto a few contrarian ideas I heard at last week's InformationWeek CIO Summit, held as part of this year's Interop event in Las Vegas. Our Summit brought together a dozen original thinkers to discuss practical innovation efforts at their companies. Here are five innovation ideas that jumped out at me.

1. Start With Internal IT Projects.

My first thought would be to start innovation efforts with business-facing projects, whereby the IT organization can dazzle its peers outside IT. But when Union Pacific CIO Lynden Tennison started a program called Innovation Station, to crowdsource innovation ideas from employees, he focused first on IT staff and internal IT projects. Tennison wanted projects he could green light without having to win over the COO or any other business unit executive, and he wanted to make sure this process actually worked to produce useful ideas before introducing it to other company departments.

Here's one way it did. Union Pacific has installed "hot box" sensors that let railroad look for problems on the wheels of its trains before those wheels fail, and one of the pros on the company's IT team saw a way to eliminate many of their false positive readings. Tennison turned the staffer loose on the idea, appointing an executive mentor and providing access to the systems and team that analyze those readings. A false positive costs real money by forcing UP to pull a train off the track or even just slow it down. The fix worked and saved the railroad about $10 million, says Tennison, who's now looking to extend Innovation Station to other business units.

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Product Jungle

Monday, May 13, 2013

IT's Private Cloud Struggles | 5 Contrarian Tips On Innovation

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